Children's lifestyle key to health, says Blair

Tony Blair today announced plans for the NHS to tackle "lifestyle" health problems, putting children's health particularly high up the agenda.

He said that with more and more treatable illnesses resulting from people's lifestyles, an emphasis on prevention would "move the health service forward", underpinning a new social contract between the public and the government.

"We help you, you help yourself, and the family benefits and the country benefits," Mr Blair said.

Flanked by three women ministers - Margaret Hodge, Tessa Jowell and Melanie Johnson - he reiterated policy plans first flagged up in the public health white paper last autumn.

These included promises for every child to have access to a school nurse by the end of the next parliament, for increased investment in school meals and sport, with all schoolchildren doing two hours of sport every week, and for food in shops to be labelled more clearly for "busy mums".

Speaking at a press launch in Birmingham, Mr Blair said: "It is, of course, parents, not government, that raise children, and the government's job is not to make decisions for them. But it is part of government's job to help people make informed choices."

Tessa Jowell, the culture and sports minister, faced tough questioning from reporters, who pointed out the 2001 manifesto had committed Labour to two hours of sport for all schoolchildren - a pledge Ms Jowell was forced to admit the party had failed to meet.

Mr Blair attacked Conservative plans to introduce "slower" and "faster" lanes for access to care under plans to pay half of patients' private healthcare bills. "Under their plans [the Conservatives ]would take, by their own admission, £1.2bn out of the NHS to help those who have enough to jump the queue", he said.

Mr Blair said the Tories' voucher scheme meant those who could not afford to pay to go private would be left in "second class" and forced to wait longer for NHS treatment.

He said: "Mr Howard has asked us to withdraw the allegation this morning. We will not. It is his policy, not ours, and if he is embarrassed by it, it his job to withdraw the policy."

Mr Blair's speech today will disappoint GPs by failing to commit a third-term Labour government to the full smoking ban in all public places that family doctors have demanded. In the public health white paper published last year, Labour signed up to a partial smoking ban. Only the Liberal Democrats have promised a full ban on smoking in public places, in line with Scotland.

The Liberal Democrats accused the Labour party of having a "fudged approach" to smoking. The Lib Dem health spokesman, Paul Burstow, said: "Despite the overwhelming evidence, the government has adopted a fudged approach which fails to protect staff and customers from the dangers of second-hand smoke."

Labour was guilty of a general "dither and delay" in its approach to public health, he added. "It should not have taken a celebrity chef to get the government to take action to improve the sorry state of school dinners," he said.

Earlier today, the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, held his own press conference on health, at which he stressed the need to cut "hidden waiting lists" for routine tests to detect cancers and other serious conditions, promising to help half a million "forgotten people". His party believes that neglect in the area of diagnosis allows conditions to deteriorate, placing further drains on NHS resources.

Mr Kennedy promised his party would devote £350m more to health than Labour over the course of the next parliament, making a total investment of £1.35bn. Much of this, he said, would be aimed at cutting waiting times for MRI scans, which detect serious heart conditions and cancers, and CT scans, which also detect neurological conditions.

The party cited a survey of its own that found more than one in seven trusts had waiting times of six months or more for CT scans.

A quarter of the 154 acute trusts that responded to the Lib Dem survey said they had scanning equipment was lying idle because they could not afford to pay staff to run it.

The Lib Dems say some of the extra money would come from their plan to abolish strategic health authorities.

Yesterday Labour also announced plans to speed up diagnosis. Mr Blair promised to reduce waiting times for diagnostic tests on patients suspected of breast or colon cancer to a maximum two weeks by 2008. Women would receive the results of cervical smear tests within seven days, Mr Blair said.